Date: 31st January 2018 at 2:08pm
Written by:

Ken Barkway expresses his frustration at the use of VAR.

There. I’ve kind of pinned my colours to the mast on the latest technology to blight the beautiful game. I started off sceptical and am now firmly convinced that it has no place in football.

Football isn’t like other sports; cricket and tennis are games that are composed of a number of very short set pieces; a ball, an over, a point, a game, the flow of the game isn’t altered in any significant way by the review process. These games have drinks breaks, so a quick look sat the telly is little more than a bit of light relief. Okay then, what about rugby, we can always learn from rugby. Can’t we? Rugby too is a game of phases, it is stop and start, it is also a game where you have around sixteen bodies in a pile, and it’s pretty hard to make out what is going on with the naked eye. In rugby, the review system is more often than not called upon to decide “if there is any reason a try can’t be given”. Play is already stopped and the game will be restarted with a scrum, drop-out or a score. It’s time consuming as the ref waits for the man in the room to look at the various angles, slow down and freeze the passage of play in question. However, in rugby, the referee is operating with an open mike. Even with this level of transparency there is criticism of its use; it can be slow but it is being used too often in situations where the decision is quite obvious. Officials are abdicating responsibility for decisions for fear of getting anything wrong. This has led to more stoppages. But, the spectators are spared the sight of an official standing gormlessly in the middle of the pitch with a finger in his ear wondering what the hell is going on. In fact, this is the one potential move that I do see some merit in, referees in football continue to remain largely unaccountable for their actions.

In essence, then VAR is useful when the decisions made are binary, in/out, try/no try, goal/no goal. And this is the crux. Football already has the binary stuff covered – goal-line technology has proved an unobtrusive success. The limitations of VAR are only too apparent when you consider the pub debates or the match of the day pundits analysing decisions with a battery of technology and still being inconclusive. The game is too open to interpretation, you show three people one incident, and you’ll seldom have consensus, in fact, you’ll usually have three opinions. And that’s the problem; you are just adding another opinion to the process. But it adds nothing to the game.

This all supposes that the referee goes to the man with the screen in the first place. The replay against Norwich two weeks ago was governed by VAR, but in one of the most hapless refereeing decisions I’ve witnessed for some time; the hapless Graham Scott used the technology in such an erratic way that those of us in the ground were utterly puzzled. The addition of VAR doesn’t take away the capacity for human error to effect the game it merely adds another layer.

VAR has been trialled in Germany and the Netherlands and in both leagues it has proved progressively less popular (or more unpopular maybe) as time has gone on.

Finally, I fear this might prove to be the thin end of the wedge. The rampant commercialism is trashing the culture of the game and making it a product will have the clubs and Premier League licking their lips looking to exploit any lull in play. It doesn’t take the wildest of imaginations to envision commercial breaks being shoehorned into matches during reviews, the addition of times out, challenges and all the other noise that elongates U.S. sports.

I look forward to debating it in the pub. Long live football.

Written by Ken Barkway – @KenBarkway

 

Comments are closed.